Weekly Spotify playlists with every song released in Denmark

Browsing the internet I discovered the fantastic website Every Noise at Once (ENO) which aims to classify and relate every single musical genre and provide examples through a complicated algorithm. I spent a long time browsing some very obscure genres, but I also discovered the new releases on Spotify by genre which allows me to see every song released in my home country of Denmark every week. This is interesting as the weekly new releases playlist made by Spotify itself consequently has tracks from several weeks prior and fails to add even a quarter of the releases showcased on this website.

I experimented using Spotify’s own API by their Get New Releases call but this provides the exact same results as their new releases playlist. I looked around on ENO, but was unable to figure out how these releases were pulled, so I did what every responsible person does in this situation and scraped the website myself.

Reusing the Spotify API I can then add these songs to a better new releases playlist which I may listen to, instead of using the Every Noise at Once website (which does not have autoplay or volume control). I titled this playlist Uhørbart which means unlistenable and is a play on the radio program P3 Uhørt (P3 Unheard) which regularly showcases newly released music. Below you can see the general flowchart of the program which is written in Python and uses the Spotipy library for API calls. The program is run every Sunday when ENO updates, and as such the chosen playlist is cleared before all the new tracks are added.

Flowchart of the script which can be found on Github.

Flowchart of the script which can be found on Github.

The name fits perfectly as most of the Danish music released on Spotify is garbage. I decided to make 4 auxillary playlists:

Good songs are hard to come by.

Good songs are hard to come by.

In general, there is a lot of completely soul-less pop and rap music which sounds like the average charting track without any redeeming qualities. These artists aim to imitate rather than be inspired and is painfully obvious. Most of them succeed and make a song which is certainly listenable but completely unremarkable. Some of them fail and make it to Uhørbart: De værste.

Every week, about 100 songs are released to Spotify with Denmark as country of origin. About 5 are mislabelled and originate from elsewhere. Approximately, 7 of these songs will be deemed good enough for De bedste while 5 of them will be poor enough for De værste. On average, about 1 of these songs will enter De allerbedste - it is fierce competition for my approval. Keep in mind that 100 songs constitutes about 5 hours of music of dubious quality, and I have better ways to spend my free time. Therefore, I quickly skip through most or listen to it while I am doing something menial.

One day I will rank all of the very best and very worst songs on these playlists and make a video or something. You can listen to the weekly playlist or De allerbedste which are publicly available:

Published 15. August 2023

Last modified 15. August 2023